City Life – The Art of Currency Garland, Chitli Qabar Chowk

Money is a kind of poetry, said a corporate lawyer who was also a great American poet.

Nowhere is Wallace Stevens’ maxim more evident than in the work of the “note mala” makers—their nimble fingers deftly turn a prosaic medium of purchase into a work of art; indeed, the craft of making a garland of banknotes has its own rhythm, like the cadence of poetry.

These garlands are made for bridegrooms, many of whom keep the garlands for life.

The Delhi Walla came across note mala maker Muhammed Sadiq in Old Delhi’s Chitli Qabar Chowk. He also sells flowers and his stall is next to a “ladies tailor”.

While ATMs spit out crisp small-value notes into eager hands, Mr Sadiq’s practiced fingers do it with much more delicacy.

He usually gets orders for ₹1,000 garlands made of ₹10 notes.

The young man charges Rs 200 per garland. Each time he receives an order from a wedding “party”, he takes a short walk to the nearby money exchange stalls for wads of crisp tenners.

One evening, I watched him make a note mala. You would have never imagined it to be so complicated.

Our artist effortlessly stapled the notes, folded their edges and rustled different shapes out of the paper currencies (one looked like a Japanese fan).

He went on to do many other complicated manoeuvres with the notes, as expertly as a seasoned baker kneads his dough.

Mr Sadiq’s note mala was ready in 20 minutes. Worth a few hundred rupees at face value, it looked priceless.

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Biography of The Delhi Walla

Since 2007, Mayank Austen Soofi has been collecting hundreds of stories taking place in Delhi, through writing and photography, for his acclaimed website The Delhi Walla. Every day, Mayank walks around the city with his camera and notebook to track down the part of extraordinary that exists in the seemingly mundane aspects of urban lives. By exploring and documenting the streets, buildings, houses, cuisines, traditions and people of Delhi, his work is also an attempt to give the megalopolis an intimate voice, and to capture the passing of time in this otherwise restlessly changing city.

Mayank is also a daily columnist for Hindustan Times newspaper, and the author of ‘Nobody Can Love You More: Life in Delhi’s Red Light District’ (published by Penguin) and the four-volume ‘The Delhi Walla’ guidebooks (HarperCollins).